Why Putin Wants Ukraine. The Holy War And What Comes Next. Friday’s Edition.
The Long Chain: Russia and Ukraine. Series 29 #3
In the spring of 2026, while still at war in Ukraine, Russia began preparing its next move. In April, Sergei Shoigu, the secretary of Russia’s Security Council, warned that Russia would use “all available methods” to protect Russian citizens in Transnistria, a Russian-backed strip of Moldova held by Russian troops since the 1990s. On May 15, Putin signed a decree making it easier for people in Transnistria to become Russian citizens. Five days later, Russia’s parliament passed a law letting the Kremlin send its army abroad to protect Russian nationals. This is the same sequence Russia ran before it took Crimea and the Donbas: hand out passports, then claim a duty to defend the new citizens.
Russia is fighting one war while preparing for another.
Monday’s Edition traced why Russia treats Ukraine as Russian: it sees Kyiv as the birthplace of its faith and nation (Schwartz’s Embeddedness) and Ukraine as the buffer guarding its open western border (Hofstede’s Uncertainty Avoidance). Wednesday’s Edition traced how Russia lost Ukraine through the Soviet collapse, NATO’s expansion, the 2014 seizure of Crimea, and the loss of the Ukrainian church until Putin massed his army on the border in 2021.
On February 24, 2022, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, expecting to take Kyiv in days. Instead, the war bogged down and became the largest in Europe since World War II. Russian dead and wounded passed a million. This created the need for a deeper meaning to justify the sacrifice, and the Russian Orthodox Church supplied it. In September 2022, Patriarch Kirill, the head of the church, claimed that a soldier who dies in Ukraine “washes away all sins.” In March 2024, a council Kirill chairs declared the war a “Holy War,” fought to defend “Holy Russia” and the wider Russian World against a West it said had “fallen into Satanism.”
That framing caused a change in who the enemy was. Russia is no longer fighting Ukraine; it is fighting the West, and Ukraine is the battlefield where the two meet. Ukrainians are cast as lost members of the Russian family, to be brought home. From Russia’s cultural perspective, this is not a war over territory but a war for its faith and its survival. That is why a ceasefire won’t end it. A border dispute can be negotiated and a compromise reached, but a holy war against the West must result in total victory.
This also explains why Russia denies Ukraine the right to choose its own path. The cultural theorist Fons Trompenaars called this particularism: the belief that a specific relationship is more important than a universal rule. To most of the world, every country has a universal right to choose its own course. To Russia, the specific bond with Ukraine, sacred and unbreakable, overrides that rule. Ukraine’s vote to join the West is irrelevant because, from Russia’s cultural perspective, Ukraine was never free to leave, just as a U.S. state is not free to leave the United States.
Putin himself fits a clear pattern. In the framework of the analyst M.J. Hornby, he blends two archetypes. The North, the Power-Seeker, driven to lead and command his nation, and the Blue Guardian, driven to protect Russian faith and traditions, and to punish those who break from them. The North part of Putin wants Russia to be powerful, the Blue wants Russia to lead the world back to the traditional Orthodox church. Putin is a leader who does not back down or compromise on what he considers sacred. To him, losing Ukraine is losing Russia.
Here’s what happens next.
